ASEBL Journal – Volume 11 Issue 2, Spring 2015
exact intent behind it is left unknown, enhancing curiosity about why the central
theme is like it is.
McCahon’s work thus fully engages people because it stimulates the interest in a
person’s perspective about the world, and it maintains this interest at its fullest because it provides no direction to one particular reading over another. As a device
for expressing viewpoints about the world and ideas by “making special” with the
advent of group cultures and mytho-poetic explanations for the world around and
as a window into another person’s personality, emotional play and mind, art is
something people are primed to engage in. Even knowing about McCahon’s life,
the mystery of how to interpret the work deepens further. Forward’s claim that
McCahon’s work is amply available for different interpretations can be expanded
to explain McCahon’s work as engaging the evolved desire for a personality of
some kind, and yet finding a morphable character. The history of our artification
compels us to seek humanity within the painting, whether in the artist’s life or in
an idea of some kind existing somewhere between the paint and the conversation it
begins between our neural-synapses, and the presence of a mind behind
McCahon’s work is both rich and flexible. It is not clear what McCahon’s views
toward religion are from Victory Over Death 2. But the suggestions of viewpoint
and ideas flush with detail many ways. Art criticism discusses the impact of art on
viewers in terms of ideas, themes and images and an artist’s ability to express them
convincingly and freshly, but knowing how and why people react to the world
around them helps provide a historical understanding of why acclaimed art creates
this reaction. Just as the old belief in art theory about forgeries is reframed by evolutionary aesthetics, so too can an artist’s influence be reframed by evolution aesthetics. Dutton’s application of the evolved interrelationship between artist and
viewer shows that the old view about forgeries, that formerly cherished forgeries
become discarded because the forgeries were believed the work of esteemed artists, misses the mark: more widely and exactly, the forgeries confuse the relationship between the great artist and the viewer. Similarly, the evolved interrelationship between artist and viewer shows that the quality of McCahon’s work is not
just the ability to attract many different viewers for many different reasons through
richness of perspective, but, more widely, that this aspect of artistic experience is a
crucial part of engaging with art.
This evolutionary standpoint elucidates from the wider phenomenon of consilience
why McCahon has been so popular. Rex Butler argues recently that McCahon’s
brilliance is anchored upon his work’s ability to influence other artists an